Enjoying Orientalism

If I could award a prize for the best chapter title ever given
in a work of fiction, I would bestow it at once on British author
Ernest Bramah for the title of Chapter III of Kai Lung’s Golden
Hours (1922): “The Degraded Persistence of the Effete
Ming-Shu.” Bramah is better known for his blind detective, Max
Carrados, but to my mind the comic tales of Kai Lung (most of them
free on Project
Gutenberg) are his best. They are sublime, particularly if you
enjoy a rococo, antiquated, kooky imitation-Chinese English
style:

“It has been said,” he began at length, withdrawing his eyes
reluctantly from an unusually large insect upon the ceiling and
addressing himself to the maiden, “that there are few situations in
life that cannot be honourably settled, and without loss of time,
either by suicide, a bag of gold, or by thrusting a despised
antagonist over the edge of a precipice upon a dark night.”

The “inscrutability” of the East has long provided us in the
West with an inexhaustible source of romance, excitement and
pleasure. Our very misapprehensions and fantasies of Asia are
immortalized throughout Western Civ., from the paintings of
Whistler to
Kung Fu. We seem specifically to enjoy the mystery, the
not-understanding.

I am a huge fan of Orientalism in all its many forms, and love
to visit the Chinatown or Little Tokyo in any Western city. The
loveliest building in all the world to me is the
Royal Pavilion at Brighton, that outrageous Regency confection
full of dragons and fake bamboo. There is something irresistibly
naive and beautiful about these fantasy views of the East. Their
very wrongness, the obviousness of how wrong they are, has a
strangely tender appeal. It’s our collective misunderstandings
dressed up, embellished, romanticized, for dramatic enjoyment.

There’s a temptation to
reduce all Orientalism to camp, but the spectrum of aesthetic
appreciation offered by Orientalism is much wider than that. Camp
asks us to enjoy things because they are so weird or funny; if our
appreciation of the weirdness comes by accident to include real
beauty or
insight, that
seems almost accidental, the by-product of a joke. But way too many
Western appreciations of the East are entirely without
mockery to credit that explanation as the sole one. Ernest
Bramah is a little camp, but a very little; still less so, the
quotations from Japanese art of Whistler or the Pre-Raphaelites.
The Pre-Raphaelites in particular were as serious as a heart attack
(a defect, in my view): they were very gravely damn sincere all the
time; their Orientalism contained zero goofball elements.

Maybe this kind of camp serves a worthy purpose of its own; it
could be that the most fantastical, theatrical interplay between
East and West affords us the best and freest atmosphere in which to
establish
a real dialogue. Our word “cosplay,” for example, is derived
from the Japanese gairaigo or loan-word, kosupure,
from English “costume-play.” Then we borrowed it back again.

But even the most affectionate Orientalism, japonisme,
chinoiserie, have their dark side, too; a racist, “othering”
aspect. Pretend-Asian, the determination to reinterpret the ideas
of another people according to our own aesthetics, can be seen as
belittling, or narcissistic, or nationalist; childish, or
primitive, or even disrespectful, hostile. Because what we define
as inalterably Other, mysterious, outside, we no longer need to try
to understand.

The complexity of our relationship to the East is multiplied in
the mirror of Eastern misunderstandings of Western culture.
Americans may delight in
fractured English t-shirts and exotic
appropriations of Western cuisine. But there’s a very serious
form of appreciation, too, of the East for the West, like Okakura
Kakuzo’s The Book of
Tea, by far my favorite commentary on this subject. Okakura
treats both East and West with the most searing candor and also
with humor and gentleness, and that makes his love of both that
much more touching and real. There’s a true affinity along with the
camp one, on both sides. For another example, there is nothing
mock, nothing mocking and no real misunderstanding at all, in this 1983 cover of
“It’s All Too Much” by a modern-day Okakura, Yukihiro Takahashi
of the Yellow Magic Orchestra.

***

Last week’s implosion of Mike Daisey (and the media storm
thereby unleashed) were set in motion by Rob Schmitz, a
Shanghai-based correspondent for American Public Media’s
“Marketplace.” (In case you’ve been on one of those media diets:
when Schmitz heard
“This American Life”‘s original presentation on Apple critic
and monologist Daisey, he immediately smelled a rat. How could an
American stage performer have met so many abused, poisoned and
underage factory workers in one six-day trip? Full-time,
Chinese-speaking Western journalists based in China were hardly
walking into such stories, and that was not for lack of trying. So
Schmitz
found Daisey’s translator, Cathy Lee, and learned that a great
deal of Daisey’s shtick had been fabricated, cobbled together from
news stories and stuff he hadn’t seen firsthand, in order to
dramatize his monologue, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve
Jobs.”)

Schmitz has been living in China on and off since 1996, when he
first went there with the Peace Corps. He’d asked to be posted to a
Spanish-speaking country, since he has a master’s in Spanish (and
speaks it just gloriously, with a beautiful, rolling Andalusian
accent.) “But the government sent me to China.” He spent two years
in rural China at a teaching college, and then returned in 2000 as
a journalist for ChinaNow.com, working under the colorful figure of
journo-metalheadKaiser Kuo,
director of international communications for Baidu. Schmitz led a
tour of Yunnan in 2006; he has documentary experience on Chinese
ethnic minorities. He seems like a real-life “China hand” from a
James Clavell book. I asked him to help me understand the fallout
from his story.

“So much of what has been written has been a simple narrative
that ignores the nuanced truth of what is going on in China,” he
said in a phone interview last week. “I hope this opens up the
debate.”

***

The distant possibility of
real understanding and contact is a weapon against the paranoia
surrounding the most wrongheaded ideas of Asia, such as American’s
fear of the Four Tigers and the growing economic might of China,
commonly stoked by demagogues employing the U!S!A! Number One!
style of rhetoric. Where once this paranoia was directed at Japan
and their
suspiciously-hegemonistic-looking purchases of Rockefeller Center
and Pebble Beach, now it is pointed straight at China and its
dragon’s hoard of a
trillion plus in U.S. Treasuries. What the fear-mongers
invariably neglect to take into account is that the global economy
is now so deeply interconnected that neither Asia nor the U.S. (nor
Russia, nor India) can ever really “win.” Either all must win, or
all lose.

Tom Scocca’s book, Beijing
Welcomes You, is a particularly sensitive and helpful
examination of relations between China and the U.S. I wrote and
asked Scocca about the Daisey affair, and about nationalism,
exceptionalism; whether Americans care less than do the Chinese
about the face we show the world. He replied: “America is generally
aghast at the notion we have a face we show to the world, let alone
that we might be judged by it. See the denunciations of
international law. Our core belief is not that we are exceptional,
really; it’s that we are normative.” Oh, boy! That is very hard to
argue with.

So even now, there are two kinds of fantasies of Asia among
Americans: the dream-Asia of our desires, the aestheticized and
romanticized Asia, and then the nightmare Asia of our prejudices
and fears, the Michael Crichton-inflected fear that They’re Taking
Over The World.

***

Aaron Bady
made a wonderful comparison last week between Mike Daisey and
the Jimmy McNulty character on “The Wire,” pointing out that
McNulty, too, was willing to deceive the public on behalf of what
he thought to be the greater good. Interestingly,
a certain amount of support
for this practice emerged last week, as reporters considered
the idea that Daisey had “raised awareness” of problems in Chinese
factories, where they themselves had perhaps failed to do so;
maybe, they said, this is a good thing. (At the Times, David
Carr
responded: “Is it O.K. to lie on the way to telling a greater
truth? The short answer is also the right one. No.”)

Rob Schmitz had this to say:

Self-righteousness, the idea that we can know the truth, is what
a good journalist will never give in to. He will give you
alternatives, show you perspectives but not choose one for you.
That leads to dangerous things.

The old conundrums of journalistic objectivity can never be
fully resolved, maybe because objectivity can never be fully
achieved. As Schmitz said, “It’s my job to sift through all these
things, to try and determine what is true or not true. We can
strive for objectivity; you can see it in the distance, you’ll
never be able to attain it; but we can keep it in view. If you can
just see it… it’s like the sun, something you can feel, but never
touch. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you think you are strong
enough to grasp the truth.”

Daisey created a dream-Asia
for us, in a proportion of about one part romance to, say, ten
parts paranoia. Our misunderstandings dressed up, embellished,
romanticized in a different way, for a different kind of dramatic
enjoyment. Because just as we fail to understand the
interconnectedness of the global economy, we never seem to get that
Chinese people are just regular people, doing exactly the things we
would do ourselves, were we to find ourselves in their
circumstances.

To exaggerate and dramatize their predicament is Orientalism of
the Othering variety, substituting feel-good hand-wringing for
knowledge and political engagement. So just go and like a Facebook
page, and buy your new iPad in peace. Pretty thin gruel, so far as
“making a difference” is concerned, as David Carr
pointed out in the Times yesterday. Rob Schmitz says
there is a better way to approach “making a difference,” viz., with
an attempt at understanding.

We love our products and we want to consume them, but some of us
feel guilty about this. The guilty may sign a petition to try and
help what they think is a terrible situation for the person who
made their product, and that may make them feel better, but I think
a still better thing to do would be to try and understand to the
greatest extent possible the lives of the factory workers who make
your products. There is a breadth of non-fiction work about this:
Peter Hessler’s Country Driving Leslie Chang’s Factory
Girls come to mind.

He also thinks that more of us should just go to China and see
and learn for ourselves, “This is not about Mike Daisey. This is
about listening to Chinese workers. In this story, the only people
we are not talking about are Chinese workers!” He went
on:

They are easy to meet! I would invite these people to come, to
stand outside the factory. There are no guns!

They will want to talk: they speak English, you are a foreigner.
A translator will cost you 50 or 100 USD/day. Stand outside, be a
journalist for one day. Because if you haven’t talked with them, it
sort of takes their humanity away. It is about you, then.
“Look what we are doing to these poor people!” When they have their
own thoughts!

Allow them to say what their real life is like. They have great
stories to tell.

“Yes, it is difficult. This repetitive-motion work. But, look:
my alternative is to go back to my village, where I will be doing
repetitive motions outside in the rain, in a field of manure,
planting rice.”

***

When I first traveled for work to Taipei and mainland China in
the mid-90s, I had nothing but Orientalist fantasies in mind; the
reality blew all my conjectures to pieces each time I went. Taiwan
is a ravishingly gorgeous place, steamy, verdant, craggy, flowery,
rich in all ways, well deserving of its first Western name, Formosa
(Portuguese for “beautiful”). I was there as a product developer
and designer, and I had these minders who took me around to various
factories (and wonderful restaurants, including one in a mountain
forest. And karaoke bars full of diaphanously-clad, giggling
maidens).

There was a lot I never managed to understand about doing
business in China. I was a hopeless negotiator, causing
consternation everywhere by demanding to know exact facts, dates,
prices. To this day I don’t understand how anything gets done in an
atmosphere of such vagueness. At one point, nearly apoplectic with
frustration after having been delayed for many, many days and
wanting desperately to go home, I blurted out, “Look. Is that
actual ‘yes,’ or Chinese ‘yes’? Because seriously I must know,
right now, this minute.” My pop-eyed counterparty exclaimed in
equal frustration: “Miss Maria, you are too direct!”

A fair assessment. But there was also a lot about doing business
in China that I adored, compared to my experiences with U.S.
manufacturers. If I had some crazy idea about how to make a photo
frame or whatever and took it to a U.S. factory, they would mainly
be all, “Hmm, no, well we don’t really do it that way, no, we
can’t, sorry, no.” But in China they would nearly always say
something like, “YES, we are going to find that kind of enamel, and
we will have the sample ready for you in five days.” Five days
might turn into ten, but still, they would figure it out. It was
completely exhilarating to me and my colleagues, this can-do
attitude.

So, how did I find that workers in Chinese factories were
treated? Just like in the U.S., there were places where everyone
seemed to be really happy to be working, and places where they
seemed less so. There was considerably less comfort than in
southern California factories, but that was more to do with the
infrastructure generally being not as good—roads were not as good,
the water not as reliable, or as clean; things like this. They do
not have OSHA in China, it’s true. But you can’t get from zero to
OSHA in a single bound. Also: there is little to nothing that
Americans can do about Chinese infrastructure.

Anyway, I met a few hundred workers, I would guess, over the
space of a couple of years, in small factories in and around Taipei
and Guangzhou. They were people who lived very humbly—as in most
poor countries, the older people are missing a lot of teeth—but
given their straitened circumstances definitely keeping body and
soul together, reasonably okay, often happy. Far better than in a
lot of places I’ve been. The opportunities for advancement, like
anywhere, are not great unless so many difficult, fragile variables
are in place, like the chance to get an education, a stable
infrastructure, access to medical care. None of which falls off a
tree, and all of which requires ongoing vigilance and political
commitment or it will fade away.

All this by way of saying that for years I’ve been in the very
trying position of defending a thing that I don’t exactly support,
namely, the breakneck industrial growth of China, fueled by the
insatiable appetite of Americans for cheap consumer goods. Over and
over I have found myself saying to some smug armchair radical, oh,
you are so against Chinese industrial practices, so these factories
should all close, right? And the millions who work in these
factories: they should starve, right? Because that would be more
humane, apparently.

If you are from a Chinese village, a factory job can mean a
huge, huge increase in your quality of life. It might easily mean
the difference between food every day and no food every day.
Between electricity and plumbing, and no electricity or plumbing.
American money (or, perhaps one should say, American IOUs) brings a
huge uptick in the quality of life for millions of disadvantaged
Chinese people. And that is too immense and too complex a topic for
a single stage show or newspaper article (or blog post).

Those who complain about the harsh working conditions in Chinese
factories appear to have forgotten that quite a lot of factory jobs
in the U.S. are no picnic, either. In America, workers are being
treated worse and worse every day. Stable employment, pensions and
employer-paid health care are going the way of the dodo.

Speaking on “This American Life”‘s retraction episode last week,
journalist Charles Duhigg made a strong and necessary distinction
between harsh working conditions vs. life-threatening, dangerous
conditions. Well, let’s not forget that we have the
latter in the U.S., too, right this very minute. Every once in
a while
terrible working conditions are exposed in the U.S., but we can
be sure they haven’t all been exposed. These stories have come to
create an ongoing unease and lack of faith not only in our
political and business institutions, but in ourselves and our own
capacity to effect the slightest change in our own circumstances,
at home or anywhere else.

So it seems that the Mike Daisey debacle comes at an opportune
time. We in the U.S. can no longer afford to treat China as distant
or foreign; the Chinese are our partners, and our destinies are
inextricably linked. We could—we should do everything in our
power to make common cause with them. Only an understanding between
our two nations as to how to manage the two economies in tandem,
how to develop and use more sustainable forms of energy, and so on,
can ensure that we all don’t just go up in flames.

As Schmitz reminded me, most Americans come from immigrant
families who endured all kinds of harsh conditions—dehumanizing
factory work, discrimination, disease, poverty, Pinkertons—and
fought, and worked, and slowly improved their own condition, and
that of their nation.

We can broaden our understanding of Asia the same way we
understand the fantasies surrounding America and Americans, e.g. we
are fat, noisy and wearing Bermuda shorts, or we are ignorant
imperialist gun-totin’ vigilantes, or we all very glamorous and
hang around with movie stars by the pool. Some little part of it is
true, sometimes, but what we need is to be understood how we really
are, as a complex and diverse people. China is the same. All we
need to do is draw a line where illusion ends and reality begins.
(And pay close attention when we spend money, and when we
vote.)

It’s not necessary or desirable to abandon all our
fantasies of China, or for the people of other nations to abandon
their Hollywood ideas of us. They provide an enlightenment of their
own, an expanded and enriched reality; a slightly fractured image
to delight in, and to learn from. There’s every reason to keep all
our most beautiful illusions, and the grain of truth therein.